Intelligence

A recent article a friend posted on FaceBook, Who Are Donald Trump's Supporters, Really?,  shows that Donald Trump supporters tend to be, among other things, less formally educated than supporters for other candidates. It might be telling about some people not really thinking very much about the real issues, but this implies that less intelligent people tend to believe in Trump. This idea doesn't completely sit well with me. I believe that "intelligence" is about experience. If a person is experiencing college courses, etc., that time is displaced. It is NOT available to experience other valuable things about the world. I'm the first/only person to earn a college degree in my biological family. My dad, brother, etc. would be considered "blue collar". But they're not stupid. In fact they are among the most intelligent people I know. So I don't really like the implication. It seems like we might want to label them as stupid, and say "See. Only stupid people like Trump. You don't want to be stupid, do you?" Now it IS possible to do "stupid", or non-useful things. You don't need to be college educated to deduce certain things. If a person has shown that they lie a lot, how can you begin to trust them? That's just common sense. I get that people and politicians lie. Often you only find out that they might have lied because they haven't kept, or been able to keep, their campaign promises. But if a person does a lot of blatant lying, long before they even get into office . . . Trump confidently says things like "Trust me. ____ WILL happen. Believe me.", without really showing concrete examples of how/where it has. It can feel comforting for some, to hear that, but . . . it looks like others have fallen for that non-substantial pitch before. It also doesn't make sense that rich people, like Trump, want to reduce the parts of government which negatively impact citizens. They absolutely DEPEND on the complexity of the IRS, and all the tax regulations. It's a great place to hide loopholes that only expensive tax lawyers have the time/resources to take advantage of. Then, lobbyists, have plenty of resources (tax money) from the rest of us, to work on channeling into subsidies benefiting their large businesses. Government has been a great business for guys like Trump. He's taken advantage of socialist-like programs like bankruptcy laws, multiple times. What he says just doesn't add up. You don't need a college education to see that.

Scary Socialism

I've been seeing Facebook posts about socialism. Some people appear to be afraid of our government "becoming" socialist. People. Please. Don't be so naive. So . . . you're against things like public schools, Social Security, labor unions, any level of minimum wage, paying armed force personnel (at all), national parks, interstate highways, GI Bill, veterans benefits, unemployment insurance, VA home loans, any pension or retirement plan, etc., etc., etc.? Because the payment for NONE of these things are based directly on free market capitalism. Even retirement plans offered by private companies are socialist. All you have to do is join the social group (others working in your company), meet the basic requirements (employee class, years of service, opt in to a plan, etc.) and you get it. It is not based on the market value you provide for the company. Your retirement plan doesn't immediately/automatically change, if you, effectively, raise your company's market value by landing a big account, or creating some huge savings for your company. The way to make it non-socialist would be to allow people to opt out of a retirement plan, and pay them 100% of the cash they'd otherwise take out of their checks to pay for this benefit. But people seem to love these socialist retirement plans. I don't see any of you anti-socialism people protesting against them, or the GI Bill, or military retirement benefits. I mean . . . don't you trust yourself to be responsible with money? Do you need a socialist safety net? The money is yours! If you are such a capitalist, why wouldn't you demand to keep that in your paycheck, and invest it on your own, rather than join a bunch of others in some socialist retirement plan? Maybe you'd say you're not joining such a socialist group for you. You did it for those poor guys who aren't responsibly saving for retirement. You're doing it for their welfare. You, then, believe in socialist welfare benefits. I mean, really, is our federal government anything BUT socialist? Are any federal employee salaries based directly on profits they help to generate on the free market? The social group is the American people. These people pool together resources (via taxes), and hope to share in some benefits. Now I think we can talk about how our socialist government channels the resources. Maybe reduce the loopholes and breaks rich people are able to take advantage of. Maybe even reduce the size of government. But if, say, a Republican says he's against socialism, how can that be true? If he or she chooses to be paid by a government which IS completely socialist, he or she IS a socialist.

Micropayment Magic

I think we would be surprised at how quickly good things would get done, if people used micropayments to promote what they wanted. It would seem like magic. I get frustrated by the the pace of progress. A lot of things have moved forward relatively rapidly. The size, power, and cost of computational microprocessors have progressed very rapidly, for example. But some things . . . are frustratingly slow. We truly can, and do, already vote with our money (e.g. the choices of clothes and food we buy, etc.). If it were easy, and cheap to process small  money transactions, large numbers of individuals could make a big difference. I think of the time I waste trying to determine if something I buy off of Amazon has what I need, and is the best buy. User ratings are helpful, and one reason I use Amazon at all (rather than, say, eBay). But you can't completely trust those reviews. Sellers offer incentives (free products to "test", etc.) to people to write "honest" reviews. When I buy on Amazon, often I think I should take the time to leave feedback, to help others. But my time is valuable. It's not just taking the time to leave the feedback. It's remembering to log back in a second time, later, after you've actually had a chance to use the product. -when you're in a position to leave actual useful feedback. Product sellers are already, effectively, paying for ratings which are useful to them. What if we cast a "vote" by saying "yes" this review was useful to me, --which goes into the ranking of useful reviews-- by actually micropaying reviewers who take the time to test products to provide useful reviews? If we voted this way, would that not attract more people into using their time and energy to provide useful information for buyers? It also seems like people, in general, might be more motivated to provide concise, useful, actionable information. Rather than feeling they need to gather enough information, and/or low quality filler, for a book, or even an article, people might feel it worth it to create short, micro articles, with just the useful information. --not information simply to sell more newspapers, or create content, suitable for attaching ads and coupons. What about funds for developing things? Research and development is a lot of trial and error. That's the process. It's expensive. Sites like Kickstarter can help generate capital to get things off the ground. But they choose which projects to allow. The Synergy Aircraft project was initially denied, until they perceived Synergy's popularity to be great, and later changed their minds. Even with this "kickstart", projects like this are often forced to beg for venture capital, if they want to continue. This means they have to not only try to develop something that is useful for people. They additionally have to formulate some sort of "business model" which will allow the venture capital investors to exclusively, and continually extract profit from any product of the development, etc., etc. But if something like Kickstarter were able to continually fund a project, couldn't a project continue more rapidly if it is not loaded down by all the baggage of "how can we make sure we can exclusively charge people for this?", and "How are we going to patent this?", etc. I guess what it boils down to is making the people who actually want to use, or see the use of, some technology, the same people who are paying for it's development. Because there is no inherent conflict of interest (venture capitalist investors vs. users), things can move faster, and you get more of what YOU want, rather than something that is easy for someone else to charge you money to use. You cut the baggage of venture capitalists, and their lawyers (patents, etc., etc.). I think about accelerating the development key technologies. Progress towards increasing the energy density and decreasing manufacturing cost of energy storage technologies (batteries, etc.) could accelerate. A breakthrough in this area would make a huge impact in our quality of life. From affordable electric vehicles, to off-grid, solar-powered, homes. --really anything you own, which requires energy, could be so much more useful. Governments are putting some money into development of different storage technologies. But if people were to contribute directly to promising projects, we wouldn't have to wait for the government (and the corporate lobbyists which control it) to determine which projects will get a chance to try and help us all. You might ask "How would we know what to invest in?". I'd say information for making that decision would become clearer, if it is not filtered and obscured by a company trying to market it's for-profit product. Have you ever tried to get simple, clear, complete, and trustworthy information from the website of a company claiming to have a "breakthrough" technology? When a researcher writes a grant application for research funding, they are forced to write a clear, concise explanation of exactly what they intend to do with the money, and hope to accomplish. Not doing so makes it very easy to triage such an application to the "don't fund" pile. If a group asks for money from people, it is in their best interest to make it clear, concise, accurate, easy to understand, etc. Marketing jargon gets in the way of that. If developers saw a mass adoption of micropayments as a viable way to fund their product research, they'd have to adjust to be able to clearly communicate the specific, differential, advantage their proposed outcome would have over existing, or other developing, technologies. I mean . . . many parts of the equation would be similar to now. You'd still have to convince someone of the usefulness and feasibility of your project. But we'd just be removing all the extra baggage of venture capitalists, lawyers, marketers, etc. adding a lot of cost and time to the whole process. Compared to now, I think it would almost appear to be like magic, how quickly/simply things could get accomplished.